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PERSONIFYING THE UNREAL

We tend to personify things with no will of their own. I grant you a lot of fish, swimming together for protection, may seem possessed of a shared will. But it just seems that way. The group does not have a mind of its own. For all the group-think in the world, there are no known group-minds.

And so to some examples;

THE CORPORATION

A voluntarily sustained legal fiction. PepsiCo can sue and be sued in turn despite not being a living being. There are a load of buildings and equipment owned by this fiction, and the decisions of the fiction are made by a bunch of appointed individuals.

The bank account may have the company name on it, but that account is handled by a person, ironically someone paid from that same corporate bank account.

THE GOVERNMENT

Another legal fiction, this time maintained by force of arms and threats. In more recent years the government has introduced some tasty carrots along with its sticks, in particular taxpayer-funded welfare systems, to ensure a large majority of people have skin in the government's game of thrones.

US

Yeah. Us. By this I mean the arbitrary group you are born into. Generally people's sympathies with regard to group lie with the Nation State. So the state has a central place in creating illusions of a group-mind.

THEM

People of a different arbitrary group to your own. The individuals of the other groups become homogenised into some kind of oblivion by the cultural outlook that every person imbibes over their lifetime.

THE ECONOMY

Ah, the personality that is made of all the economic acts by all the people in all the markets within a defined geographical area, generally one nation state, continent, or the world. This fictional phenomenon is the object of study for macroeconomists and most econometricians, neatly rendering those two fields of study equally fictional, and so pointless.

It remains to be seen whether humans will set aside these silly ideas and embrace a more peaceful, inviting, brighter outlook, but I am quietly optimistic that a great enlightenment awaits once we cast off the material shackles of historical consciousness and government.

Not to say we should have no historical consciousness. I merely mean that people, in making their judgements, shall someday no longer be ruled by the expanse of time behind them, but rather by the possibilities ahead.

On the next Ecomony Blogtime; Matty demonstrates beyond a doubt that economics is more interesting than watching paint dry!

Do read the links in the order in which they appear please. Finding the right comments in the third link might be quite interesting. They are all by a user called BestTrousers and start with "RI" meaning R1.

The main argument used by HealthcareEconomist3 is to give a survey of several works, while BestTrousers goes for comparative advantage.

Hopefully you good folks can indulge me by forgiving this post. It is an unfinished mess because I wanted it out there as the anchor for a hyperlink from a Reddit thread.At the momebt everything below is a jumble of notes, but I will be reworking it bit by bit starting today.Hopefully this post will be sorted out and typed in full before the end of April 2017.

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Historical materialism is the idea that history progresses in stages - slavery, then feudalism, then capitalism, then socialism, then communism - driven by changes in the technologies or techniques of production, and that any human civilisation will exemplify this process.

This makes historical materialism an exercise in both historicism and materialism.

Historicism is the idea that studying the past can reveal history's in-built course or narrative, and so show you the future.

Materialism is the idea that ideas ( and institutions) ultimately* don't matter in determining our destinies, and that therefore only material…

The idea that labor exploits capital is equally as plausible, sans assumptions*, as the idea that capital exploits labor. This is only intended as a response to the formal concept, descriptive or normative, of exploitation in Marx's schema from Capital Volume I.

* Assumptions include the power relation whereby capital is just assumed to be above labor hierarchically.

~ ~ Capital exploits labor because...
... Capital earns income from production done by labor that capital didn't perform
& ~ Labor exploits Capital because...
... Labor earns income from capital that labor didn't buy~
Basically in good old formal logic fashion both of those cases above, being factual descriptions, are true at once or are false at once.